Planning on going to the Olympics?

From today's SANs Newsbites (http://www.sans.org/):

--Gordon Brown Aide's BlackBerry Stolen on China Trip (July 20, 2008) An aide to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown fell prey to a likely "honeytrap" scheme in January when his BlackBerry phone was stolen after he brought a woman he met at a disco in China back to his hotel room.
The aide was accompanying the PM on the trip; he reported the device missing the next morning. Officials suspect the incident was orchestrated by Chinese intelligence. It was not disclosed whether the device held top-secret information, but even so, it could potentially be used to gain access to the Downing Street server. Blackberrys used by Downing Street staff are password-protected but most are not encrypted. The aide has been informally reprimanded.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4364353.ece
[Editor's Note (Ullrich): A nice reminder to leave electronic devices at home when traveling abroad. And if you are geek enough to take them, being all for sudden popular with women is a dead giveaway for an intelligence operation.
(Northcutt): Classic! If you know anyone going to the Olympics, please share this story with them and suggest they leave their laptops and other electronics at home. This will be a field day for Chinese intelligence gathering. They have been targeting people and are quite
ready:
http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article22984
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/24/asia/AS-GEN-China-Olympic-Intelligence.php
(Paller) Or take "travel-tops" and "travel-phones" that are throw-aways without sensitive data or access to sensitive systems.


I especially liked the comment "being all for sudden popular with women"! That one raised a chuckle.

Unless the chinese telco's block the IPsec ports then this probably couldn't happen with a WM6.1 device running under SCMDM and better yet you'd be able to wipe it remotely to eliminate the risk of compromise[1]. If the vpn comes up you're golden.
And as for the bit about Gubmit employees using phones that aren't encrypted, that's a bit of a shocker. WM6.1 would have taken care of that nicely, too.

Better would be using your phone with a Redfly (what the editor referred to as a "travel-top", although I hadn't heard it called that before). No need to take your laptop with you at all. Link here: http://www.celiocorp.com/

[1] Not the same kind of compromise as the article speaks to ;-)

Professional news and not quite so

The title of this post is very typical of me, actually.

Hadn't seen mention of it, so I'll do it here: the MDM Team Blog is now open for business. Link here: http://blogs.technet.com/scmdm/archive/2008/06/16/welcome-to-the-system-center-mobile-device-manager-product-team-blog.aspx

Dieter's team are just wonderful and he's a great guy. They're already participating en masse in the technet forum, and I have no doubt that you'll glean some useful gems from this link also.

On the not-quite-so-professional front, here's a pretty picture:

The 17th, and signature, hole at Summerbrooke Golf Club in Tallahassee, FL. Right around the corner from where I live. Actually, it's not even 300 yds away from my front door, and I've driven by it on an almost daily basis for the past 5 yrs, but have only played the course a dozen or so times.

I aced it today.

The sweetest 7-iron you could ever hope to hit. One bounce, and it was in the hole.

I know that's the object of the exercise, but actually doing it (after a gazillion mis-starts) makes the actuality of it all come as quite a shock. A nice shock, but a shock all the same.

It's not a joke when I say it took 40 years for it to happen for me. I don't play anything like as often as I'd like to, and my dad introduced me to the game when I was about 4 yrs old.

And for the cheapskates out there, Weds at 3pm is a tremendous time to get a hole-in-one. There will be nobody in the bar.

If you want to share the joy, however, plan on coming back later (as I did ).